Mark Kennedy

The plays are sometimes poignant, sometimes sad and often hysterical...Squeezing three playwrights into a single show is dangerous business, particularly when they're all tacking the reality of relatives, but only Allen seems to have emerged the stronger for the effort.

It is as audacious as it is inventive — a simple premise that allows Hall to create a fictional universe of her own with a historical giant. It is also somewhat sacrilegious, showing the fleshy, banal side of a civil rights saint, which is partly the playwright's goal, too...The inevitable standing ovations after the play are for King as much as for the actors and Hall.

What emerges is a somewhat clunky and sometimes limp seven-character play about the complicated relationship between fathers and sons that gets a surge of electricity whenever Frank Langella - at his fussy, oily best - appears. Yet so strongly does the actor loom that he threatens to destabilize the production.

A revival of Stephen Sondheim's 'Follies' has arrived on Broadway just in time for Halloween. It's perfect for the season — it's got ghosts, skeletons bursting out of closets and a haunted house. It's also a treat. 'Come on, let's go home,' Phyllis says at the end of the show to Ben. But it's been such a good and tuneful production that you may hope no one listens to her and the ghosts stick around just a little longer.

Tony Award-winning Daly puts everything she's got into portraying Callas in a new revival of Terrence McNally's play, directed by Stephen Wadsworth, which opened Thursday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Daly is sometimes ragged, but always courageous.

The first act drags as the storytellers pack in as much background as possible, but the pace picks up in Act 2. The songs, by U2's Bono and The Edge, have been gradually Broadway-ized, or at least de-Edge-ified. Gone, for the most part, are tons of jangling guitars. If there was once a sense that this Irish duo could simply write two dozen new songs and plunk them into a musical, that time is gone.

Murphy, as usual, loses herself in the part, which requires her to shift between time periods, often while remaining on stage...Unfortunately, the book and lyrics - by 'Beaches' novelist and first-time Broadway story writer Iris Rainer Dart - and music - by Mike Stoller ('Smokey Joe's Cafe') and Artie Butler (who wrote the pop standard 'Here's to Life') - don't always rise to Murphy's high standard.

It becomes clear by the second act that Greenberg's story - or the acts she discovered - cannot sustain this musical....An actress portraying Leslie Gore makes an appearance singing 'It's My Party' but it's not clear why. Toward the end, it really has become a jukebox musical, adding songs for atmosphere rather than consistency.

Larry Kramer's historic play about the beginning of an epidemic that has killed millions can be seen as a time capsule of a period when the disease was first emerging. But it can also be a cautionary tale for any horror we have yet to fully grasp...Mantello manages to make his unlovable Weeks lovable and he steers clear of hagiography. Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe co-direct and push the throttle - each scene is fraught with emotion, anger is quick to explode, papers are tossed with abandon, and any moment of humor is milked for the relief it offers from a hectic production.

In the midst of the galloping nuns, bomb plots, shouting, love triangles and general craziness, Bananas Shaughnessy, played by a brilliant Edie Falco, emerges as the most poignant, most grounded character in a cracked universe...Stiller makes Artie's darkness and naked hunger seem almost understandable. He also beautifully captures the push-pull of a man still in love with his wife and yet pinning for a new, free affair.

The play, which opened Sunday at the Cort Theatre and is directed with calm elegance by Doug Hughes, is riven with '40s sayings - 'Make it snappy,' 'Don't get excited,' 'So long, kid' - and yet has a very relevant, if somewhat, ham-fisted indictment of politics awash in corrupting money. It has a message campaign finance reformers would find swell.

'Jerusalem' clocks in at over three hours — with two intermissions — and is a marathon for Rylance, who does a headstand into a bucket of water at the beginning and then stumbles about, getting into fights, smoking drugs, drinking speed-laced beer and hysterically cocking his snoot at everyone the entire time. Director Ian Rickson might have made a few cuts to keep the running time down, particularly in the second act, which lags at times. Butterworth's script, often lyrical and always rooted, also has made no allowances for an American audience, so brush up on British slang for such drug-related terms as 'snafflers' and 'whizz.'

Calibrated to be frothy, giggly and yet often poignant, the Jerry Zaks-directed musical is based on the 1992 movie of the same name starring Whoopi Goldberg, who is now producing. This is a musical that hits all the right spots, achieving something close to Broadway grace. It helps that the musical has great original tunes by songwriter Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater that skitters from Motown, to soul and funk, to disco and even a little jokey Barry White. Menken and Slater, who also teamed up for 'The Little Mermaid,' know perfectly how to switch up the mood and tempo. (See how their 'Take Me to Heaven' transforms from a Donna Summer-like number at the beginning to a religious hymn by the end.)

The play is helped by two stunning performances - by Turner, who pretty much never leaves the stage, and Evan Jonigkeit, making his Broadway debut as the addict Cody. Watching these two angry, broken, world-weary animals circle each other is an uncomfortable pleasure...[Turner] is the play's fairy godmother and soul.

'Wonderland' doesn't know whether it wants to be a fairy tale or a rock opera or a trippy joke or a cartoon. The show, which had an extensive pre-Broadway stop in Tampa, Fla., proves that even out-of-town tryouts can't always help something that is unsound.

There are few dry eyes in the house at the conclusion of this tale and that includes both weeping gray-haired Lincoln Center subscribers and sniffling high school field trippers. And why not? There's no shame in crying over a love story between a boy and his horse, even if that horse is made up of cane and plywood. Plus, there's another secret ingredient in those puppets: plenty of heart.

The play is broken up into nine scenes and set designer Todd Rosenthal keeps the action at a roiling boil by having three different apartments and furniture mechanically rotate and flip into view, echoing the choppy, bewildering world of Jackie. The riveting, original horn-led music by Terence Blanchard is the icing on the cake for a play that is shrill and ugly and funny and touching.

And yet there's something here that just isn't connecting, that smacks a bit of a color-by-numbers musical. A large reason may be the role of the hero, who is, after all, a cipher - a faker, a fraud, a man who is whatever we assume him to be. Beneath the pilot's uniform or doctor's white coat, there's little but a smile and a wink. 'Blink your eyes and I'll be gone,' he sings in one song. And he's right: He leaves nothing that resonates behind. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film, this time the role of Frank Abagnale Jr. has been handed over to Aaron Tveit. As pretty as a Ken doll and blessed with a wonderful voice, Tveit nevertheless struggles to convey genuineness.

Joseph may be a gifted young playwright but he has pretty much hit the jackpot by landing the 59-year-old Williams, who stalks this fascinating, ambitious play about war as a restless tiger's ghost in human clothing, all bushy-bearded and sarcastic. The range of emotions Moayed conveys over the course of the play is stunning, while Titizian is nightmarishly good as the murderous Hussein. Williams sinks his teeth into his meaty part, sometimes bending the script to serve his voice, not the other way around.

Radcliffe has plenty of help onstage from a very funny and smooth John Larroquette as boss J. B. Biggley, a gifted Christopher J. Hanke as his scheming rival Bud Frump, and the delightful Rose Hemingway as his romantic interest Rosemary Pilkington. To be blunt, Radcliffe is not a Broadway singer. His voice is nice, but thin and he strains to fill the theater - 'American Idol' judge Randy Jackson would call it 'pitchy.' Somehow it doesn't matter. He works so hard that we're on his side even if he, like his character, doesn't have the creds. Plus, there's so much here that works: songs by Frank Loesser; a delightfully cynical book about corporate behavior that resonates today; Derek McLane's sets made of massive interlocking cubes; and Catherine Zuber's wickedly clever costumes, not to mention Ashford's cheer-inducing choreography that even takes advantage of Radcliffe's small stature and Larroquette's tall one.

'The Book of Mormon,' which opened Thursday at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, is inventive and slick and subversive. It is funnier and smarter than 'Monty Python's Spamalot,' managing to offend, provoke laughter, trigger eye-rolling, satirize conventions and warm hearts, all at the same time.

Leguizamo's pain has always been our gain through five deeply personal shows, and his new one is no exception. 'Ghetto Klown' is filled with hysterical stories...'I realized being on stage is my religion,' Leguizamo says at the end. 'Sharing my unhappiness on stage is my happiness.' Let us hope he is unhappy for a long time to come.

Crudup, who originated the role of the tutor on Broadway in 1995, delivers a quite brilliant portrayal of the weasellike university don desperate to find a Lord Byron connection and burnish his credentials. Esparza, as a graduate student of mathematics who focuses on grouse population, has taken a quieter role and made it heartbreaking.

While it's fashionable these days to have the monstrous Bracknell tackled by a man, Bedford never seems tempted by the drag casting to veer toward camp, even when served up some of the best Wildean lines. His lips perpetually pursed as if sucking on a lemon, Bedford scowls and peers imperiously without ever betraying his real chromosomal makeup, even winkingly.

The playwright's ambition cannot be denied: It is a geographically sprawling, frantic affair set primarily in New Orleans about the chaotic years at the turn of the 19th century as the Great Powers squabbled and swapped land at a whim. Fictional characters are mixed with historical giants.